India, it is often said, is not a country but a continent. From north to south and east to west, the people are different, the languages are different, and the country is different. Its diversity of languages, religions, cultures, and traditions has no parallel example anywhere in the world.
There are few countries on earth with the enormous variety that India has to offer. It’s a place that somehow gets into your blood. Love it or hate it you can never ignore India.
Heroes and demons, saints and saviours, atheists and seekers, India, despite being a secular state, harbours arguably the world’s richest heritage of spiritual and religious experience.
India has one of the oldest and greatest civilizations in the world with rich cultural heritage. Its major religion, Hinduism, is practised by approximately half of the population. It is one of the oldest extant religions
India also has one of the oldest scriptures in the world called Vedas. The four-volume Vedas that many regard as the repository national thoughts that anticipated some of the modern scientific discoveries. India is also the land of the Lord Buddha (founder of Buddhism), Lord Mahavira (founder of Jainism) and Guru Nanak Dev (founder of Sikhism). The country has been thought of as a nation of philosophers with a well-developed and even idyllic society.
Few countries in the world have such an ancient and diverse culture as India Stretching back in an unbroken sweep over 5000 years; India’s culture has been enriched by successive waves of migration, which were absorbed into the Indian way of life. It is this variety, which is a special hallmark of India. Its physical, religious and racial variety is as immense as its linguistic diversity. Underneath this diversity lies the continuity of Indian civilization and social structure from the very earliest times until the present day. Modern India presents a picture of unity in diversity to which history provides no parallel.
India’s extraordinary history is intimately tied to its geography. A meeting ground between the East and the West, it has always been an invader’s paradise, while at the same time its natural isolation and magnetic religions allowed it to adapt to and absorb many of the peoples who penetrated its mountain passes. No matter how many Persians, Greeks, Chinese nomads, Arabs, Portuguese, British and other raiders had their way with the land, local Hindu kingdoms invariably survived their onslaught, living out their own sagas of conquest and collapse
Indian mathematicians are credited with introducing the concept of zero to the world. There is plenty of evidence that ancient India had a very strong interest in Ayurveda India’s indigenous form of medicine, which is still popular throughout the country and indeed the world. Archaeologists have found ancient India to have a very high degree of town planning in terms of straight roads, sophisticated sewage systems, granary storage and public baths.
With over 1600 languages and dialects, India’s linguistic diversity is extreme Art in India is vivid and lively, refined and sophisticated and bold and vigorous at the same time. From being essentially religious in purpose in the beginning, Indian paintings and sculpture have evolved over the years to become a fusion of various traditions, which influenced them.
As someone once said, ’’If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began to dream of existence, it is India.’’